The White Shepherd

by Annie Dalton

  She heard someone pounding down the stairs behind her. Anna hurled herself towards the open doors, but Kit threw himself on top of her in a rugby tackle, knocking all the breath from her lungs. ‘No you don’t, you little bitch!’ he hissed. She felt a sharp pain as the needle punctured her thigh. Kit sat back on his haunches, still getting his breath back. ‘Go ahead,’ he invited. ‘Run! I won’t stop you. And Huw can’t. You broke his fucking nose!’

  Anna started to crawl towards the doors on hands and knees that were fast turning to jelly. She was almost there when she heard a low, drawn-out, unmistakably evil growl.

  Still on her knees, she turned to see a terrifyingly transformed Bonnie, ears flat to her head, her upper lip curled back showing wolf-like fangs dripping long strings of saliva. Covered in her own blood, she was the dog of nightmares as she sprang at Kit’s throat, snarling.

  Cursing, Kit staggered back, but Bonnie was too weak from blood loss to sustain her attack, and he was able to fling her from him, sending her crashing into Anna’s dresser. Her grandmother’s precious cups and saucers flew up into the air. Bonnie slid to the floor in a rainbow of broken china where she lay totally still and silent.

  Nobody was going to come to save her, Anna thought. She had fought them with all her strength, but it wasn’t enough. But at least she and Bonnie could die together.

  Anna began to crawl towards her dog’s limp unmoving body. She had almost reached her when she thought she heard people yelling upstairs. ‘Don’t actually shoot him, darling!’ a familiar voice called. ‘Just clock him hard with the barrel!’ An ominously loud thud followed.

  If this was a hallucination it was a shared one, because Kit made an instant dash for the doors, but Anna somehow grabbed him by the ankles, bringing him toppling down.

  She was still grimly hanging on to him when someone came thundering down into the kitchen and she heard Tansy yell, ‘Stay right there or I’ll shoot you in the bollocks, you disgusting bastard!’

  Anna’s vision was starting to blur, so she couldn’t be sure what was real and what was due to the effects of the drugs, but she thought she saw Tansy pointing a gun at Kit with a shaking hand. Isadora was talking into her phone and simultaneously brandishing a nearly-full bottle of Bombay Sapphire over Kit’s head like a club.

  Using the last of her strength, Anna managed to curl on to her side, so that she and Bonnie were nested together like spoons. Resting her head against her dog’s warm lifeless body, she stroked her tenderly, and then, completely spent, she closed her eyes.

  Strangely, instead of stopping, her hallucinations shifted into a new and gentler octave. She felt a fleeting touch against her eyelids, like a ray of winter sunlight, and she thought she heard Naomi say softly, It’s all right, Anna. Your friends came to save you.

  Then the tide came rushing in and carried her away into the dark.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The grave was so small.

  A short distance away, a robin perched on a nearly leafless branch, producing a stream of crystalline sounds for no other reason than that it was alive. The sky was a misty watercolour blue. She could hear church bells and the sound of a distant train.

  The last time she was here it had been for the funeral, and she’d been so heavily sedated that it almost felt as if it was happening to someone else. It had been a hot, cloudless summer’s day, and that had felt jarring and wrong, as if mass murders only happen in midwinter. There had been people sobbing and clutching each other for support, people she didn’t even know, and, in the background, press photographers snapping and police watching.

  Sixteen years ago. Half Anna’s lifetime. Now the mossy old churchyard was steeped in peace. A giant holly-tree was already covered in scarlet berries. In the new year snowdrops would come up in green and white drifts among the headstones. Thanks to her friends, Anna would be here to see them. She still didn’t know what to make of her strange visitation in those moments before Kit’s sedative had overwhelmed her. Had she really been visited by Naomi? Or had it just been Anna’s personal version of her, the part of Anna that had needed to change and reach out, the part of her that, despite everything she’d lost, still wanted to live?

  Like a half-remembered song, that longing to be truly alive, to rejoin the world, had first tentatively made itself felt after she’d moved back to Oxford, Anna realized now. She’d told Jake she’d gone to the rescue centre to find a dog because she was scared to be alone in the house. But that hadn’t been the whole truth, since Anna had only recently understood this herself. Secretly, Anna had hoped that getting a dog would change her life. And it had! She had found a murdered woman and almost been killed herself, but in the process she had exorcized demons and found good friends who cared about her.

  She hadn’t brought flowers. In her mind her brother would still always be nine years old, and nine-year-old Will had not been big on flowers. She was here at his grave because she had woken with the realization that today should have been his birthday, so she had bought helium balloons in his favourite colours and secured the ends of their strings with a hefty but handsome stone she’d taken from her garden.

  ‘Do you think Will would like them?’ she whispered, stepping back, and the snow-white dog beside her immediately came alert. Anna reached down to pet her silky ears. Yesterday, the vet had given Anna permission to remove the hated lampshade device from around her White Shepherd’s neck. The stitches had all been taken out, and though Bonnie was still moving cautiously, her wound was healing well. Like Anna, Bonnie was one of life’s survivors.

  The robin was still singing, its tiny throat throbbing as it poured an increasingly intricate song into the air. ‘Channelling Mozart,’ Anna said softly, and she smiled to herself because she had finally solved a small but persistent mystery.

  After the horror of that night, and after Isadora and Tansy came back with Anna to her flat to help clean up the mess, she’d found the contents of Laurie’s box strewn across her study. Owen’s diary, the one he’d been using before he died, had been hurled across the room. It was one of a line of specialist diaries made by Moleskin, especially loved by writers and artists because of the addition of an inside pocket for small memorabilia, tickets, photographs. The night that Anna had scanned in Laurie’s papers she’d been too tired and panicky to pay proper attention. The actual diary had ended halfway through with Owen’s protest-ations of love for Laurie. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was anything else to find. But as she picked up the diary from where it had fallen, she’d felt something rustle inside. She knew it was silly, that it might just be a long-forgotten shopping list, but it felt like a final message from Laurie.

  Heart beating, she’d pulled out a yellowing sheet of A5 paper, worn into creases from being constantly unfolded and refolded. It was a poem written in Owen’s handwriting. It was titled ‘The Tree of Sorrows (II)’ and it was dedicated to My Darling Laurie. In the poem, Owen revisited the image of the sleepless lover in the first version. This man was older and a little wiser, but equally unable to shut his mind to the sorrows that haunt the Tree outside their window. There is so much suffering: his own, his parents’, the world’s.

  But instead of sneaking from his bed to be alone with his pain, the man takes his lover out into the winter’s night, where they defiantly make love against the trunk of the Tree of Sorrows. When dawn comes the lovers find themselves in a landscape that is utterly transfigured. The Tree, together with all the trees for miles around, has burst into simultaneous blossom. There are other miraculous happenings. Prison bars buckle and break under the sheer weight of fruiting vines. The old become young. All the birds begin to channel Mozart. Owen’s poem was meant for Laurie’s eyes only, and it was playful, passionate and silly. Whatever Anna’s private misgivings about their relationship, this was the poem that Laurie had loved best, with its message that his and Owen’s love was infinitely more powerful than the dark forces ranged against them.

  With a final flurry of notes, the robin flew
off, and Anna turned to look for her friends. The two women had taken their dogs to the older part of the graveyard, keeping a tactful distance until they were needed. Anna could see Isadora peeling back a spray of ivy so that she and Tansy could read the name on a weathered headstone.

  Anna gave them a wave, and they walked over to join her.

  For a moment, the three women silently contemplated the balloons Anna had brought for Will as they tugged at their strings in the breeze. Then Tansy gave Anna a sideways look. ‘You know Kit told the police I had a gun? Liam told me.’ She gave a mischievous laugh. ‘Luckily, they didn’t believe him! Liam’s like – but she’s a vegan! What are the chances she’d go marching into her friend’s house waving a shooter?’

  ‘He didn’t really say “shooter”?’ Anna said.

  ‘No, he actually did,’ Tansy said. ‘I told him he watches too many Guy Ritchie movies!’

  The charges against Kit Tulliver and Huw Traherne were so serious that they’d both been remanded in prison pending their trial. Sara had apparently left the Traherne’s marital home. Anna suspected she was with Dritan, but she could have gone away with Eve until the media frenzy had died down. Nobody knew for sure, just as nobody knew who would take over the running of the Traherne foundation.

  They set off walking back to the car, taking it slowly because of Bonnie. The women had talked together several times since that night, but still found themselves needing to go over and over what had happened; a kind of informal therapy, Anna thought. It was novel and comforting, not to be dealing with her latest trauma completely alone.

  ‘So what have you done with your dad’s “present”?’ she asked. ‘Did you send it back?’

  Tansy just gave her an enigmatic smile.

  ‘I almost wish we’d shot him,’ Isadora said fiercely, ‘or at least smashed that bloody bottle over his head – Kit Tulliver, I mean,’ she explained. ‘I still feel so terrible about him, Anna. I let myself be completely taken in, and he could have—’

  ‘He could have, but he didn’t,’ Anna said, interrupting. ‘You and Tansy came and saved me.’

  ‘And you’re going to the lakes with sexy Jake!’ Tansy waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

  ‘I keep telling you, he’s booked separate rooms,’ Anna insisted, though she privately hoped this arrangement might change.

  They had reached the lych gate in the shadow of a yew tree, where the women stopped to attach leads to their dogs.

  ‘Did you ever figure out why your dad sent you the gun?’ Anna asked abruptly.

  ‘Apparently, he had a “feeling”.’ Tansy put ironic air quotes around the word. ‘At first I just thought he was playing his old mind games, trying to reel me back in, then I remembered all the times my dad’s “feelings” had kept him alive and/or out of jail.’

  ‘And you did sound so strange when you phoned to ask me about Huw,’ Isadora explained. ‘Then Liam told Tansy you’d gone to Huw’s office and accused him of killing Laurie.’

  ‘Not my smartest ever move,’ Anna said.

  ‘I’d say a downright stupid move!’ Tansy gave Anna’s arm an affectionate squeeze to take the sting out of her words.

  A few days after Huw and Kit had been taken off in handcuffs, Inspector Chaudhari had paid Anna a visit. He’d explained what he couldn’t tell Anna at the time she’d come in with her suspicions. ‘We’d just found out that there were significant holes in the so-called Ripper’s statement. Things didn’t line up. There was no way he could have killed Naomi Evans. And though I wasn’t sure who had, I wanted you out of Traherne’s way while we investigated more thoroughly.’ Before the inspector left, he’d said, ‘I wanted to say how much I respect you for fighting for Laurie Swanson the way you did.’ Then he’d given her a stern look. ‘I also want you to promise me you’ll never to do anything that stupid ever again!’

  He was a good man, Anna thought, and his words had meant a lot.

  Still standing by the lych gate, Isadora was playing their new game of What if? ‘I keep thinking what if we hadn’t come to apologize for not listening to you, Anna.’ Her eyes went wide with distress. ‘We wouldn’t have heard Bonnie making that terrible sound. You’d have ended up like Naomi!’

  ‘Thank God, Isadora still had your spare key,’ Tansy said.

  Anna still didn’t really do hugging, but she briskly hugged the two women who had saved her and Bonnie, then they closed the gate behind them and began walking back along the grass verge to where they’d left Anna’s Land Rover.

  ‘Can you drop me back at Marmalade?’ Tansy asked.

  ‘Of course. What about you?’ she asked Isadora.

  ‘Just take me home, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to interview a potential lodger. Anything to keep that bloody wolf from the door!’

  Anna opened up the back of her vehicle, and all the dogs piled inside. She could hear Tansy talking anxiously about her own housing problems. When her friends got back from their travels, she’d have to find somewhere else to live. Life was like that, Anna thought. The darkness and uncertainty never really went away, but like the man in Owen’s poem, you could make a choice. You could decide to be a sufferer, picking over the bones of old sorrows for the rest of your days, or you could be a lover like Naomi. Anna wanted to be like her. She wanted it with all her heart, but she wasn’t sure if it was something she could achieve through willpower. She thought timing might be involved. She might just need more time to overcome her old mistrustful ways.

  She was about to get into her car when she heard a familiar ping. Anna quickly checked her mobile and saw that she had a Google Alert. She hesitated, but the habit was too ingrained and so she clicked on the link.

  Her friends’ voices, the sound of the wind in the trees and other sounds of the natural world cut off. The only sound left was the rush of blood inside her ears.

  He was back. He was back in the UK.